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Sure,
everyone has heard of the AR-15, the most popular rifle in America, but
what about the Armalite AR-1 or AR-17? There are a few interesting
stories there.

The “AR” in each case does not stand for “assault rifle” as those who are uninformed often think. It is, in fact, short for Armalite,
the firearms company that employed a generation of incredible
forward-thinking gun designers, engineers, and inventors including
Eugene Stoner, Charles Sullivan, Charles Dorchester, Arthur Miller,
Daniel Musgrave, Robert Fremont and even the great Melvin Johnson
(inventor of the M1941 Johnson rifle series).

Established
in the early 1950s as a division of the Fairchild Airplane Corporation,
the latter perhaps most famous today for their A-10 Warthog tank buster
attack plane, Armalite leveraged aviation industry’s advances and
applied them to firearms. Their engineers registered some of the first
firearm patents incorporating foamed plastics in both stocks and
handguards, aluminum receivers, self-lubricating alloy gun barrels,
folding synthetic buttstocks, and other developments.

Let’s look at their guns.

AR-1 “Parasniper”

(Photo: Springfield Armory NHS)

According to Springfield Armory National Historic Site, which has four of these rare rifles in their collection, the Parasniper was what today would be called a “Mountain”
rifle that used an early foam-filled fiberglass stock and other
weight-saving means to trim pounds. Using a steel-lined aluminum alloy
barrel, the Mauser type receiver was chambered in the commercial .308
Winchester caliber. While the 5-pound scoped rifle was tested by the
Army at Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1955, it was never adopted and faded
into history. Interestingly, Parasnipers made during this period were
produced at Armalite’s Hollywood, California plant.

AR-3

(Photo: Springfield Armory NHS)

Another
“lost” Armalite is the prototype select-fire battle rifle designed by
the company to fire the then-experimental T65E3 cartridge, which became
the 7.62 NATO. Similarly, Springfield Armory was testing the T44 and T48
rifles in the same caliber, as a potential replacement for the M1
Garand. The T44 and T48 grew up to become the U.S. M14 and FN FAL,
respectively. Tough competition. A smaller version of the rifle,
chambered in .222 Remington, was prototyped as the AR-11 and likewise
never made it to production. The AR-12 had much the same story, never
leaving the drawing board.

AR-5

A bolt-action rifle, the
AR-5 was chambered in .22 Hornet to replace the U.S. Air Force’s
stockpiles of H&R-made bolt-action aircrew survival rifles. To
conserve space and weight, the gun had a hollow plastic stock that the
takedown barrel could be stored in and, best yet, the whole thing could float.
While the USAF reportedly liked it, the AR-5 was not adopted. This
design was reworked for the commercial market and found much more
success as the…

AR-7

Henry
Arms’ U.S. Survival is the current production version of the old AR-7
Explorer. In the 1960s, its modern styling was instrumental in the
little popgun finding its way into at least three James Bond movies and
the TV spy comedy Get Smart before showing up in Buck Rogers in the
1970s (Photo: Guns.com)

Taking the
general concept of the AR-5 and applying it to a semi-auto chambered in
.22LR with a steel-lined 16-inch aluminum barrel, the AR-7 Explorer was
born in 1959, at the same time as Remington’s Nylon 66, and proved Armalite’s first commercial success, being produced by the company until 1973. Since then, it was made by Charter Arms, Survival Arms, and others, with New Jersey-based Henry Arms producing it as their U.S. Survival rifle since 1998.

AR-9

Showing
that not all ARs are rifles, Armalite worked on the AR-9, a very
lightweight — 5.5-pound — semi-auto shotgun with foam-filled plastic
furniture and a high-strength aluminum receiver and barrel. This later
became the AR-17, which entered production in 1964 and only sold about
2,000 examples during its short two-year run, making it a sought-after
collector’s item today. Curiously, it was marketed in not only a basic
black finish but also a gold one as well.

AR-10

The
early AR-10 battle rifle concept as tested by the U.S. Army in the
1950s. Note the pasta colander-style muzzle brake, waffle magazine, no
forward assist, and the top-mounted ambi charging handle. (Photo:
Springfield Armory National Historic Site)

Learning lessons
from their earlier attempt at a battle rifle in the AR-3/AR-11/AR-12,
Armalite came up with the rifle that became the AR-10
around 1955 and was soon submitting it to the Army for testing. Using a
top-mounted carrying handle on the upper receiver that held a rear
sight, the 7.62 NATO-caliber select-fire beauty, like Armalite’s
previous designs, contained lots of aluminum and plastics, and was one
of the first such designs considered seriously by the military for
adoption. It made a big difference as the gun was more than 3-pounds
lighter than the M1 Garand while having the capability of firing at 600
rounds per minute in its select-fire mode.

In the end, the AR-10
was not adopted by Uncle Sam, who went with Springfield Armory’s
in-house developed M14 in 1957, but the gun, licensed to Dutch arms
maker AI, was adopted in small numbers by Portugal, Sudan, and even KLM
Airlines!

This
particular Armalite AR-10 in the Guns.com Vault is chambered not in
.308 but .243 Win, a round incredibly popular with hunters. (Photo:
Guns.com)

The AR-13 and AR-14 were both wildly
different prototypes from all the other Armalites, the first reportedly
an early multi-barreled aircraft gun, the second a semi-auto rifle in
hunting calibers. This brings us to the…

AR-15

The
early Armalite AR-15 with distinctive mottled brown furniture to
include a hollow buttstock (Photo: Springfield Armory National Historic
Site)

Scaling down the AR-10 to use the 5.56mm NATO
round, Armalite’s AR-15 proved a slam dunk winner– for Colt– as Armalite
sold off the design to the Connecticut-based company in 1959 who soon
successfully pitched it to the U.S. Air Force for use with Security
Police guarding bases. Within a few years, it had been adopted by the
entire U.S. military and saw extensive service in Vietnam.

This
early circa-1958 Hollywood-marked Armalite AR-15 in the Springfield
Armory collection still has a top-mounted charging handle and thin
AR-10-style handguards. Also, note the original design sans the forward
assist. The gun competed against the Winchester .224 Light-Weight
Military Rifle (WLAR) in Army tests, with .223 at the time being
referred to as .222 Remington Super, but was unsuccessful, triggering
Armalite to sell the design to Colt who then successfully pitched it to
the Air Force. (Photo: Springfield Armory National Historic Site)

The current Armalite M-15 line is a more updated version of the original AR-15. (Photo: Guns.com)

AR-16

The AR-16, not to be confused with the M16 or AR-15 (Photo: U.S. Patent Office)

With
most of the trade secrets that made the AR-15 so novel going to Colt
and from there largely into the public domain, Armalite began work on a
new 7.62 NATO battle rifle with a stamped receiver. Rather than the
AR-15’s buttstock buffer spring, the AR-16 used a twin pair of action
springs to eat up recoil and a short-stroke gas piston action with an
operating rod over the barrel and a rotating bolt. This, in turn,
allowed a folding stock. While the AR-16 was not successful and never
made it past low-level prototype runs, its design, rechambered for 5.56,
went to live on as the…

AR-18

This AR-180B is in the Guns.com Vault and ready to be added to a collection. Armalite made these from 2003 to 2008.

Using
groundwork from the unproduced AR-16 with lots of engineering from
Arthur Miller and others, the AR-18 was chambered in 5.56 NATO and (stop
us if you have heard this before) was unsuccessfully pitched to the
U.S. Army as a new infantry rifle. Like with their previous AR-10, the
AR-18 was licensed to overseas gun makers such as Howa in Japan and
Sterling in the UK while the company, still based in California, also
licensed production of semi-auto AR-180 variants and, after the company
was rebooted, the polymer-receiver AR-180B.

The original
Armalite went belly up in 1983, with its parts and machinery being
exported to the Philippines where the AR-18 was to be produced, although
that plan did not ultimately pan out. Rebooted in the U.S. in 1995 by Eagle Arms,
the current Armalite is based in Illinois and produces not only the
M-15 series ARs, and AR-10 variants but also the AR-31 (.308 Win) and
AR-50 (.50 BMG) bolt action rifles.

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